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big scary monsters posted:Any recommendations for good SFF (preferably SF but I'm open to especially good fantasy too) on Kindle Unlimited?
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Jul 26, 2017 19:02
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Patrat posted:I was really not a fan of those books sadly and stopped reading part way through the second one, too much of the generic military space opera focus on 'The US Marines in Space. So Much Honour! So Awesome!' You're judging by real standards, not Kindle Unlimited standards.
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Jul 26, 2017 20:44
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Khizan posted:You're judging by real standards, not Kindle Unlimited standards. People realize that libraries have Ebooks, right? Why bother with this poo poo?
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Jul 26, 2017 22:53
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uberkeyzer posted:People realize that libraries have Ebooks, right? Why bother with this poo poo? Some of us have a much better tolerance for bad books. When we're bored, we start reading pulpy, dumb, and mildly entertaining garbage due to being unable to find higher quality books you haven't already read or are interested in. Then, over time, Stockholm sets in, and we begin to actively seek out more garbage books.
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Jul 26, 2017 22:59
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So I finished Kinds of the Wyld and that was a nice, entertaining read. Took just enough of the piss at D&D tropes without sliding into sniggering reference. It sort of fits into the same emotional niche for me as Goblin Emperor in the generally gentle-hearted tone (despite the buckets of blood being flung all over the scenery) and appreciation of the fun it was having. As a companion volume to a book about a bunch of old men taking one last tour, I also finished Jackalope Wives, which is a short story collection mostly about old women with perilously few fucks left to give, but they gotta scrounge up just one more for this one last thing... It's definitely a bit darker than Kings, and while many of its stories take the tone of fairy tales, endings are not all happily ever after. Still, those were some nice stories, and (Ursula Vernon writing as) Kingfisher has a dry sense of humor that goes well with her frequent use of southwestern settings, though the stories drift through a lot of off-the-beaten track wild places. She is definitely a lady who loves the outdoors, especially when it's inhospitable.
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Jul 27, 2017 00:07
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Thanks for the recommendations! I started reading that Stone Born book that was mentioned last page but the pacing was really weird and the writing kinda bad so I dropped it and am checking out some of the other suggestions. KU seems like it's worth it if there's a specific series in it you know you want to read, but otherwise pretty spotty. Not sure I'll be renewing.
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Jul 27, 2017 00:42
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Wolpertinger posted:Some of us have a much better tolerance for bad books. When we're bored, we start reading pulpy, dumb, and mildly entertaining garbage due to being unable to find higher quality books you haven't already read or are interested in. Then, over time, Stockholm sets in, and we begin to actively seek out more garbage books. Also, my local library's ebook selection is garbage as well so it's just another dumpster to dig through.
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Jul 27, 2017 00:49
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occamsnailfile posted:As a companion volume to a book about a bunch of old men taking one last tour, I also finished Jackalope Wives, which is a short story collection mostly about old women with perilously few fucks left to give, but they gotta scrounge up just one more for this one last thing... Oh cool. I read "Jackalope Wives" and "The Tomato Thief" already. They were pretty swell.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:09
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Wolpertinger posted:Some of us have a much better tolerance for bad books. When we're bored, we start reading pulpy, dumb, and mildly entertaining garbage due to being unable to find higher quality books you haven't already read or are interested in. Then, over time, Stockholm sets in, and we begin to actively seek out more garbage books. *werner herzog voice* these men have a sickness of the soul
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Jul 27, 2017 01:54
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I just re-read The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox and dunno why just Bridge of Birds is listed in the OP. The compilation (2008) is pretty great and The Story of the Stone and The Eight Skilled Gentlemen deserve to be mentioned as well.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:59
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So, I wouldn't say I bounced off The Culture but a couple of years ago I read 3 of them and and had mixed feelings about them. Without getting into detail, I started with Consider Phlebas and didn't hate it but I didn't really enjoy it either. Next, I read Player of Games and liked it enough to move on to Use of Weapons which I must be one of the few people to think it was just ok. Anyways, after having a bad string of books the last couple of months, I decided to pick a random Culture book and give it a read. I picked Surface Detail and although I'm not quite finished, I've barely been able to put it down and will probably finish it tonight. I can't really put my finger on what I like about it more than the other ones I mentioned but I've really enjoyed it. I'm looking to read another Culture book next and was wondering if anyone had a recommendation on which one. Considering how I've felt about the ones I've read.
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Jul 27, 2017 02:03
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Honestly you bounced off the three most hard to get into (probably since they were his first books) and it's only uphill from there. I would definitely recommend Look to Windward, or Excession.
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Jul 27, 2017 02:07
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imo the Culture novels divide into three groups of three fairly neatly, and you read and bounced off the first. The three 'late' Culture novels are Matter, Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata and if you liked SD the other two are well worth a try. They're detectably different in style to the earlier books.
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Jul 27, 2017 02:23
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A human heart posted:*werner herzog voice* these men have a sickness of the soul In the latest r scott bakker novel, the encyclopedic glossary is 1/3 of the book
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Jul 27, 2017 02:26
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Rough Lobster posted:Man I just did not enjoy the latest Laundry Files novel at all. Not funny and not scary. What a mess of a book. Books 1 through 4 are really solid but I just don't like the directions Stross has been taking the series in. Like, super heroes, elven invaders, and a goddamn kaiju start showing up and no one seems to give much of a gently caress (even if I think all of those things were dumb things to bring into the Laundry universe). I actually really enjoyed Delirium Brief. I thought it was a well paced series of disasters starting at "that's not good", running through "him ? oh gently caress", and ending with a situation that would normally be considered an unqualified disaster, but at least alien parasites aren't riding everyone on earth. I think I liked Nightmare Stacks more, but I had a lot of fun reading DB. It was nice to get a Bob POV again, now that he's at DSS level. I like having the (surviving) Auditors on-stage, and actually meeting someone from Mahogany Row was a treat. Nightmare Stacks and The Fuller Memorandum are still the best of the books. The Annihilation Score has some dull stuff in it, unless you like the minutia of bootstrapping a government agency. However it is a very good novel about PTSD and midlife crises.
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Jul 27, 2017 02:37
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I remember people talking about the first three books a lot more than the others in this thread.
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Jul 27, 2017 03:11
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I really enjoy Joel Shepherd's writing for some reason, it clicks with me. It's not nearly as pulpy as say Ian Douglas's star carrier or even worse, b. v. larson's star force series which is... pretty bad.
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Jul 27, 2017 03:27
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Less Fat Luke posted:Honestly you bounced off the three most hard to get into (probably since they were his first books) and it's only uphill from there. I would definitely recommend Look to Windward, or Excession. Excession was one of the first sci fi books I ever read when I was a wee lad and I didn't even know it was part of a series until I read this thread last year, its a good, fun book all by itself.
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Jul 27, 2017 04:46
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I finished 'The Once and Future King' today and really liked it, especially TH White's writing style - felt like he was sitting across from me telling the story the whole time. Anything else that has a similar storyteller style?
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Jul 27, 2017 06:29
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Finally read Sufficiently Advance Magic on KU, and I enjoyed it. I read a few books by Andrew Rowe earlier and this one feels like a noticeable improvement over his last two and I quite enjoyed reading it. The book does still feel like an indie work, unsurprisingly. Got 4 hours(a single drive) into a litRPG audiobook I grabbed cheap Ascend Online it proceeded to literally just be him playing a new video game and not even particularly well. So yeah dropped especially with so many audiobooks I was looking forward too coming out. Bhodi posted:I really enjoy Joel Shepherd's writing for some reason, it clicks with me. It's not nearly as pulpy as say Ian Douglas's star carrier or even worse, b. v. larson's star force series which is... pretty bad. Same. Well, to clarify, I bounced off his earlier works a bit but the 2nd Cassanova trilogy and The Spiral Wars feel just right.
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Jul 27, 2017 14:57
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General Battuta posted:In the latest r scott bakker novel, the encyclopedic glossary is 1/3 of the book Some people have a 'glossary module' in their brain.
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Jul 27, 2017 15:22
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Bhodi posted:I really enjoy Joel Shepherd's writing for some reason, it clicks with me. It's not nearly as pulpy as say Ian Douglas's star carrier or even worse, b. v. larson's star force series which is... pretty bad. Yeah, I like most of his stuff. The Spiral Wars stuff is a bit "Marines, gently caress yeah!" though and I can understand being put off by that.
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Jul 27, 2017 17:21
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Khizan posted:Yeah, I like most of his stuff. The Spiral Wars stuff is a bit "Marines, gently caress yeah!" though and I can understand being put off by that. Personally I'm a fan of the _______, gently caress yeah! subgenre
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Jul 27, 2017 19:38
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The only litrpg I recommend is the Caverns and Creatures series by Robert Bevan. Drew Hayes has a series that's pretty good but I can't remember the name offhand.
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Jul 27, 2017 23:32
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my bony fealty posted:I finished 'The Once and Future King' today and really liked it, especially TH White's writing style - felt like he was sitting across from me telling the story the whole time. Anything else that has a similar storyteller style? I've always sort of felt that way with some of Neil Gaiman's stuff (and only partially because he does his own reading for a lot of his audiobooks). Stardust, especially had that feeling, as well as a lot of his short stories. His Norse Mythology book has that sort of "storyteller" feel to it as well.
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Jul 28, 2017 00:59
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Internet Wizard posted:I've always sort of felt that way with some of Neil Gaiman's stuff (and only partially because he does his own reading for a lot of his audiobooks). I saw Neil Gaiman live at a storytelling event once, and he was very very good. That's definitely his medium, it just doesn't fit perfectly in any kind of written or recorded medium. I imagine that's why he changes it up so much.
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Jul 28, 2017 05:14
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Khizan posted:Yeah, I like most of his stuff. The Spiral Wars stuff is a bit "Marines, gently caress yeah!" though and I can understand being put off by that. I think I'd describe the Spiral Wars series as being a adventure series where almost everybody in it also happens to be in the military.
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Jul 28, 2017 08:01
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mllaneza posted:I actually really enjoyed Delirium Brief. I thought it was a well paced series of disasters starting at "that's not good", running through "him ? oh gently caress", and ending with a situation that would normally be considered an unqualified disaster, but at least alien parasites aren't riding everyone on earth. I think I liked Nightmare Stacks more, but I had a lot of fun reading DB. It was nice to get a Bob POV again, now that he's at DSS level. I like having the (surviving) Auditors on-stage, and actually meeting someone from Mahogany Row was a treat. To continue the Delirium Brief discussion, I just finished the book and it left me quite confused, I feel like I skipped a chapter or two : - Since when is The Mandate the avatar of the Black Pharaoh ? In Annihilation Score he was merely a secondary villain with strong political ambitions and jedi mind tricks, Mo's crew had no particular difficulty dealing with him. Now he effortlessly snuffs out the Sleeper's operation, deus ex machina-style ! - It seems that the SA has been aware of Iris' extracurricular activities all along. Was she acting as an undercover of sort ? What was even the point of that, to have a back channel to the Black Pharaoh ? - Why was even Bob planting bugs at the BBC ? - Minor nitpick : for people constantly described as the Laundry's occult (and deniable !) heavy hitters, Persephone and Johnny don't actually accomplish much in the field... All in all I liked the first part with everyone forced to deal with the consequences of the Nightmare Stacks and public exposition, the second half less so... I'll still read the next one, 'cause I really want to see how Stross is going to dig himself out of this.
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Jul 28, 2017 08:26
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:Finally read Sufficiently Advance Magic on KU, and I enjoyed it. I read a few books by Andrew Rowe earlier and this one feels like a noticeable improvement over his last two and I quite enjoyed reading it. The book does still feel like an indie work, unsurprisingly. I don't know why I like these trash books so much (probably for the same reason I like poo poo movies) but I'm still on a bit of a litRPG bender. I liked Sufficiently Advance Magic OK too and it is an improvement on Andrew's previous books. I liked how unapologetically goony the main character was in the socially awkward/autistic manner and not in the borderline sexist manner. Also I read the first two books of the "Selfless Hero Trilogy" by William D. Arand and Jesus Christ it went off the deep end with the second book. So the first book isn't that bad. It's got this setup where an IT-support guy for a space ship needs to regain his memories so he can rescue his crewmates from some kind of mind/machine VR MMORPG they were put in for a long space trip and if they die in the game they go braindead. So there's a nice motivation and a bit of mystery you could have with his memories and such and there's some kind of a reason why he is playing this game. At the start of the book he rescues a couple of female NPCs who become his D&D group. Caster, barbarian, thief. A bit of a weird harem feel to it but it's nothing too odd.They have adventures. They get into trouble. They get out of trouble. Meanwhile the background plot is getting resolved a bit by bit. All that jazz. The second book though. Holy poo poo. That weird harem feel with a couple of female NPCs escalates to the point where the main character has a literal army of women at his beg and call. All of them want to bone him because his charisma stat is so high. He makes up magic spells that make women orgasm. He discovers he's so overpowered in the game that he can conquers three different kingdoms and defeat all the other players. He kills most of his 500,000 crewmates for which he feels so bad he just has to sleep with his female companions to fight off the nightmares. As revenge he makes one of his enemies immortal so he can torture him forever. It's all a glorious trainwreck that reads like the authors not-very-secret sexual/power fantasy. The MMO and anime nerd version of "Fifty Shades of Grey" and the first book I've read in a long time that I felt genuinely dirty reading. It has a rating of 4.16/5 on Goodreads.
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Jul 28, 2017 08:56
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Have you considered the Sword Art Online series instead?
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Jul 28, 2017 09:06
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Is that one of your Japanese cartoons?
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Jul 28, 2017 09:25
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my bony fealty posted:I finished 'The Once and Future King' today and really liked it, especially TH White's writing style - felt like he was sitting across from me telling the story the whole time. Anything else that has a similar storyteller style? I like to think of this style as "grandfather by the fireplace" and honestly the only other things I know that are like it are The Hobbit, and EH Gombrich's non-fiction history book "A Little History of the World." I actually only really like the first volume and the fifth/final volume in The Once And Future King - the middle three I found really dull and boring - but those two books are more than enough to make the whole thing worth reading. It also has one of the coolest titles in fantasy history.
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Jul 28, 2017 09:35
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BobMorane posted:To continue the Delirium Brief discussion, I just finished the book and it left me quite confused, I feel like I skipped a chapter or two : 1 I dunno it almost feels like a retcon or something. I remember him basically being a joke in Mo's book. I thought he was just a guy with a super strong glamour spell and charisma. 2 The other thing that got me about this was, since when do Nyarlathotep and the Sleeper have a beef, and for what reason? They're both mentioned in Fuller Memorandum as in the same hierarchy, but the Sleeper not being anywhere as powerful as the Black Pharoah. Also, wasn't the entire point of unleashing the Sleeper being that he's needed to eventually free the Black Pharoah himself?
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Jul 28, 2017 10:32
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BobMorane posted:'cause I really want to see how Stross is going to dig himself out of this. Depends how invested he is in the series. He just abandoned his Singularity universe because hosed up the causality of it.
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Jul 28, 2017 11:03
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BobMorane posted:To continue the Delirium Brief discussion, I just finished the book and it left me quite confused, I feel like I skipped a chapter or two : Does he need to? The situation seems to have greatly stabilised. Britain has a Great Old One on its side who seems favourably enough inclined to humanity and human society to let life continue largely as usual (give or take a few hundred dead babies a year or whatever), making it a not-especially-pleasant but stable bubble that can ward off both the general weird poo poo of Case Nightmare Green and, more importantly, a subverted, hostile USA. The next few books will probably have the Laundry starting to operate from a position of strength and security, even if they have to compromise their morals a bit to do it - in some ways, we're back to the early books, before The Rhesus Chart, The Nightmare Stacks, and The Delirium Brief started ripping irreparably huge chunks out of the organisation and where Bob and company were working for a reasonably large, capable employer.
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Jul 28, 2017 11:15
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Collateral posted:Depends how invested he is in the series. He just abandoned his Singularity universe because hosed up the causality of it. It was that or get nobbled by the Eschaton.
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Jul 28, 2017 12:19
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Rough Lobster posted:1 I dunno it almost feels like a retcon or something. I remember him basically being a joke in Mo's book. I thought he was just a guy with a super strong glamour spell and charisma. Yep, I guess I'll have a look in Fuller Memorandum, because I'm a bit fuzzy on the relative evilness of Black Pharaoh vs The Sleeper. Darth Walrus posted:Does he need to? The situation seems to have greatly stabilised. Britain has a Great Old One on its side who seems favourably enough inclined to humanity and human society to let life continue largely as usual (give or take a few hundred dead babies a year or whatever), making it a not-especially-pleasant but stable bubble that can ward off both the general weird poo poo of Case Nightmare Green and, more importantly, a subverted, hostile USA. The next few books will probably have the Laundry starting to operate from a position of strength and security, even if they have to compromise their morals a bit to do it - in some ways, we're back to the early books, before The Rhesus Chart, The Nightmare Stacks, and The Delirium Brief started ripping irreparably huge chunks out of the organisation and where Bob and company were working for a reasonably large, capable employer. Maybe "dig himself out" was a bit strong, it certainly will be interesting to see how principled characters like Mo and Bob are going to react now that the fox has been invited into the henhouse.
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Jul 28, 2017 12:37
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BobMorane posted:Yep, I guess I'll have a look in Fuller Memorandum, because I'm a bit fuzzy on the relative evilness of Black Pharaoh vs The Sleeper. Depends whether Nyarlathotep pulls an Angleton, I guess.
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Jul 28, 2017 12:39
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BobMorane posted:Maybe "dig himself out" was a bit strong, it certainly will be interesting to see how principled characters like Mo and Bob are going to react now that the fox has been invited into the henhouse. "Mo" and Bob and babby
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Jul 28, 2017 13:31
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Number Ten Cocks posted:"Mo" and Bob and babby Yeah about that. I can see babby being either a vessel for an eldrich horror or the savior of us all. There's no way Nyarlethotep didn't mess about when it shielded Mo (unless there's another explanation yet to be revealed) to allow her to survive Sleeper v. Crawling Chaos.
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